Lee Friedlander: Christmas

With a healthy dose of plastic and garlands, Friedlander's visions of a commercial, uniquely American Christmas evoke both irony and nostalgia.

Whether you've celebrated Christmas at any point during the last 70 years or not, you've undoubtedly encountered many of the scenes shown here in Lee Friedlander's eclectic black-and-white documentation of the holiday season in the United States. From urban sidewalks to uniform suburbs, Friedlander captures it all: storefronts on Main Street; plastic nativity scenes on snow-covered lawns; inflatable snow globes and Santa Clauses; questionable St. Nicholas-themed lingerie; disproportionately large or disappointingly small Christmas trees; and houses so covered in string lights that they demand nothing less than a miracle from the local power grid.

As in all his work, Friedlander's Christmas images reflect his own version of the holiday. Is Christmas in America a religious celebration? A commercial precept? A misunderstanding? An indulgent blasphemy? Or all of the above? The only certainty is that December 25 has provided an opportunity for the town photographer to hold up a mirror to a flawed, inventive, troubled, and wonderful society.

Lee Friedlander (born 1934) has published more than 60 monographs since 1969. He was featured alongside Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand in the 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, now considered a landmark event in American documentary photography, and received his solo retrospective at the same museum in 2005. He has lived and worked in New York since 1956.